


the very things that one day leave

by brella



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Character Study, Crushes, Developing Relationship, F/M, Non-Chronological, Relationship Study, Unsaid Things - Freeform, Weather
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-03-07 06:24:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18867544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/brella
Summary: “She seems nice,” Asahi says meekly from Koushi’s other side, shouldering his bag. “Really dependable.” He smiles that timid Asahi smile, as though he’s self-conscious of his own expression. “Kind of like Suga.”Koushi, Kiyoko, and the seasons.





	the very things that one day leave

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lavendrsblue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lavendrsblue/gifts), [strikinglight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/gifts).



> me, rolling in to punt meg and allie into their graves five months after i promised i'd do it:
> 
> ([Title](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef2-__saiwo).)
> 
> (the absolutely wonderful introvertednerd/Erica made [a beautiful playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/ericayong/playlist/5xp7R1QRG8uj0ov2mg35LV?si=BrF26F2TTDeL68xua4t3tA) to accompany this fic and i’m too emotional to speak but it’s perfect, it’s perfect)

_The very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new._

— Roland Barthes

 

 

*

 

 

The girl wears glasses and her hair in twintails. Koushi falls in love with her eyes first.

He has been a high school first-year for a month only. Being a rookie on the Karasuno volleyball team is not what he had imagined it would be. The third-years leave early and the second-years are never there and the word “Nationals” sounds made-up in the captain’s earnest but aimless voice, like the punchline to a joke for which Koushi had missed the set-up. His legs are sore and his hands are numb and the sweat on the back of his neck is cold. The air outside is oppressively hot—summer announcing itself too early—and the gymnasium has the AC on full blast. And the girl’s eyes are gray.

“I’m Shimizu. Shimizu Kiyoko.” Each syllable a raindrop. Koushi has already memorized them. She’s standing in front of the stage that never gets used. She bows, hands laid neatly over each other. “Thank you for having me.”

“Thank you for joining us!” Tashiro squawks, bowing back way more energetically than bows require. “A _manager_ , wow! This is going to be awesome!”

Koushi thinks that this is probably the sort of reaction that might make girls blush, or act humble, or crack a smile—except Shimizu does none of these things. Her face is tranquil and elegant, like an empress. She has a mole at the corner of her mouth. She does not smile.

She blinks and says, “Mm.”

Koushi finds out later that Daichi had recruited her. Well, to be more precise, Daichi tells him this several times before bringing her to practice and Koushi just forgets all of them, same as he forgets his own name, looking at her writing careful notes in her blue Campus notebook instead of looking at the ball. (Forgive him, nose.)

“She’s never been a manager before,” Daichi says in the club room afterwards, “but she did track and field in junior high. And she’s really curious about volleyball.” He puffs up after the last part, as though Shimizu is curious about something that he personally invented. “She’s a first-year, just like us. I think she’s going to be great!”

Koushi, halfway through tugging his t-shirt over his head, tries to picture Shimizu on a track. Sprinting ahead of the others gradually, with calculated, unremitting effort. Leaping over a hurdle. Long legs, long hair, a clear and crisp concentration in her eyes, like the stillness before a summer rainstorm.

His head pops up through the collar, tousling his hair. He stares blankly at the door of his locker, hands still holding the fabric, stomach twisting inside of him.

“She seems nice,” Asahi says meekly from Koushi’s other side, shouldering his bag. “Really dependable.” He smiles that timid Asahi smile, as though he’s self-conscious of his own expression. “Kind of like Suga.”

Koushi dawdles in the club room for a little while after Daichi and Asahi have left. His right middle finger keeps throbbing—he did block that shot from Kurokawa at a bit of a weird angle—and it’s bugging him. Plus he would feel like a bad friend if the first thing he said to Daichi on the walk home was that he’s developed a ridiculous crush on their manager within ten minutes of knowing her, which he isn’t 100% sure he trusts himself to keep secret at the moment.

His nose hurts, too. No one had even yelled at him for being distracted—for ostensibly not _caring_ —which had somehow felt even worse than the alternative. Kurokawa had just said “don’t mind” and left it at that.

Koushi stares down at his palm, flexing his fingers slowly to test for deeper damage, as he closes and locks the door behind him. The summer air all but wraps itself around his shoulders.

“Excuse me.”

Koushi whirls around so quickly that his bag swings over his hip and bumps into the wall. Shimizu is standing there, holding her notebook and a pencil, watching him.

The uniform really suits her. Especially with her cute hairdo. Even though it’s probably over 90 degrees out, she’s wearing opaque black tights—Koushi’s eyes stay on her knees for a bit too long before he forces them back to her face.

“A-Ah,” he sputters, hand frozen in mid-air because he’s suddenly forgotten the motions for a wave. “Ah. Guwah. Um.”

She inclines her head, one twintail slipping over her shoulder—like a river. She seems completely unperturbed by his weird noises. “Sugawara-san, wasn’t it?”

“Yeh,” Koushi replies, scrambling for a vowel, a consonant, _anything_ , “Yes! Sugawara Koushi! First-year! Nice to meet you!”

He thinks he sees a subtle glimmer of something in her eyes—a smile? But her mouth hasn’t moved. Is that possible?

“Nice to meet you, too,” she says. “Pardon me, but—please remind me which position you play. I forgot to write it down.”

Koushi blinks rapidly down at her. The swell of the cicadas fills the silence. What position _does_ he play?

“Setter,” he answers the second it mercifully returns to him.

Shimizu gives a slow nod, mouthing the syllables to herself— _set-ter_ —and lifts her notebook, tidily writing on the open page. From this angle, Koushi can see how long her eyelashes are—full and dark and pretty. As she writes, a lock of hair slips from her forehead and into her eyes; she brushes it aside, hooking it behind one pale ear.

“Right,” she says, lifting her head back to him. Pretty. “And the setter is…”

“Th-the player who makes tosses,” Koushi says, face warming when he realizes he’s staring. “And, uh, decides on attacks… and set-ups… and stuff.”

“Mm.” Shimizu nods again, continuing to write with the kind of concentration Koushi would expect if he were explaining alchemy. “I see. Thank you.”

She snaps the notebook closed, ducks into a half-bow again, and turns around to leave—in the same direction Koushi will have to go, but he’ll probably just stand here and wait fifteen minutes so she doesn’t think he’s creepily trying to follow her.

Then she stops and starts to turn back.

“Ah. And my name is—”

“Shimizu Kiyoko,” Koushi responds in a single breath.

The cicadas are still buzzing ceaselessly in the hot, dry air, and far off, Koushi can hear a bat clang into a baseball, a whistle blowing, crows calling. Shimizu looks back at him, eyes a little wider, cheeks a little rosier, lips softly parted around what would have been her name.

“S-Sorry,” Koushi blurts out. “I-I didn’t mean to be rude; I just—”

And then—then—she does laugh. A warm, quiet chuckle, soft and low in her throat. Something inside of Koushi opens to it, slowly.

“Sugawara Koushi,” she says, brisk but somehow careful, as though it is a stone she’s turning over in her hands.

It halfway shifts the earth beneath him. What comes next takes care of the rest.

“Let’s both do our best.”

She lifts a hand to wave goodbye and then goes on her way, turning around the corner and out of sight. The air in her wake smells faintly of peaches.

In the hallway outside the club room, under the bottomless azure sky, Koushi falls in love with the way she says his name second.

There’s a catch: he will not realize this until long, long after.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Koushi’s used to losing. Really, he is. Really! It’s not the end of the world. He’s not going to mope about it. They worked hard. The second- and first-years have promise. _Kageyama has promise_. It’s really not—

Ah.

Distractedly, he lifts his right hand to his cheek, fingers coming away wet. At last his mind catches up to his body: his eyes are burning and his throat is tight and his legs hurt, they _hurt_ from standing for so long (from not moving). There is a sound waiting in his chest, wounded and writhing.

He covers his face with one hand and uncages it. He’s glad there’s nobody around. The echoes are sharp against the linoleum, as if rearing back to cut him.

He lucked out finding this spot, way in the back of the gymnasium building, wedged into a corner between the emergency exit and the empty janitorial office. Far enough away from the bathrooms and the entrance that no one will bother coming, but close enough to a window that he can be reminded of the world continuing to exist beyond it.

He had told Daichi he was going for a quick walk, unable to rid himself of the image of Tanaka and Nishinoya and Asahi diving for the ball in slow but fluid motion before Hinata hit the ground—and he had just kept on walking, past countless windows with a view of the overcast sky, hallway upon hallway. Eyes on his sneakers. One, two. One, two. One…

He grips the number on his jersey, the white against the black, jutting into it like so many teeth. And he cries alone in the empty hallway.

 _Promise_. What good a word is that, anyway? All at once indefinite and binding. People had said it of him, too.

They had said it of all of them.

After a minute or so, he hears a quiet, accidental breath behind him. He doesn’t bother cleaning his face. When he cranes his neck back, he wishes that he had.

“Shimizu,” he croaks.

Shimizu has one hand on the corner where the hallway turns. The reflection of the light through the window overhead glints on the lenses of her glasses. For a moment, Koushi can’t see her eyes. He watches as her fingers tense upon the wall.

“The bus is leaving soon,” she says. Her voice is very quiet and a little hoarse, unspoken apologies crowding in the cracks between the words.

“Okay.” Koushi pulls up a smile—pulls it from the farthest depths of himself, with a great, lugging effort. He hopes it’s a good one. “Sorry to worry you.”

And that’s kind of presumptuous, isn’t it, to assume she was worried—maybe he should take it back. He means to; he really does, but somewhere halfway it turns into, “What a letdown, huh?”

He laughs when it comes, hollow and unplanned and quite frankly unwanted—the last feeble defense his body can stomach lifting. Like it’s no big deal. Because it isn’t, right? It’s not the end of the world. He’s not going to mope about it. They worked hard. The second- and first-years have…

“None of you could ever let me down, Koushi.”

The laugh evaporates. Koushi’s mouth stays open around its ghost, his eyes set blankly on an unimportant spot on the floor, right next to Shimizu’s sneaker.

“You played well,” she says. Her voice buckles beneath an unseen weight: “You all played so well.”

Koushi knows that. He _knows_ that.

“And it wasn’t enough,” he mutters.

Shimizu steps closer to him, the toes of her sneakers coming to mirror his. Koushi still can’t look at her.

“This wasn’t our last chance,” she tells him. “Not yet.”

“It feels like it was,” he blurts out, too tired to hold it back. “It feels like—” _The end of the world_.

“Sugawara.”

That’s all it takes. His name, in her voice, the same as before. He lifts his head.

Shimizu’s face is angled up at him. The rims of her eyes are faintly red, the corners moreso. Splotches of pink are fading from her cheeks. Some strands of dark hair are stuck to her forehead, curled from sweat.

She opens her mouth slightly, but no sound rises to it. Koushi still waits, cold fingers slack at his sides. She glances away from him and lifts a hand to brush her thumb fleetingly over her right eye. Something else pinkens her face, then, blossoming out all the way down to her neck.

“Sugawara-san,” she starts again, “I’m glad I became the manager for the volleyball club.” Softer, then, the way she had told them all _do your best_ from what had seemed like a hundred miles up, she says, “I’m very—proud of you.”

Koushi’s heart stutters, slows, stops. And then, with gradual, building bravery, it starts over.

“Are you going to stay?” he rasps, instead of _I’m proud of you, too_ , instead of _thank you_ , instead of _oh, your eyes_.

Shimizu nods almost as soon as he finishes the question. “Yes.”

“Even with university, and even—”

“Aren’t you?” she asks. As calm as ever.

Koushi feels suddenly awkward, bent just slightly over her with his shoulders hunched—spine bowed to bring him closer without him noticing. Shimizu doesn’t seem to care, gazing back up at him with a steady, unbranching resolve.

The weight of the quiet in the hallway gives. Before he can remember the components of the word, Koushi, with his jersey and his sneakers and his pride, still held together with his bare hands in spite of everything, says to Shimizu’s eyes: “Yeah.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

There is a single dark mole at the nape of Shimizu’s neck. Koushi learns this in his second year, during a monsoon. She is bent over his kitchen sink when he sees it, drying her wet hair with the fluffy pink towel he’d taken from the hall closet. A window of skin is visible between the towel and the collar of her jersey. His jersey.

“Sorry,” he says by way of announcing himself. Shimizu doesn’t turn around, but her hands go still in the towel. “Um, the tea’s ready.”

Shimizu straightens up, lowering the towel to let it hang around her neck. She combs her hair over her shoulder with one hand and wrings it out over the sink, the last of the droplets clattering down one by one onto the metal.

Koushi watches. The sleeves of his jersey are a little long on her, the hem meeting indented knuckles. He’d hung her jacket to dry on his mom’s fold-out rack in the corner of the bathroom, by the snake plant.

Shimizu half-turns to him, slippers making soft sounds on the tile. Her glasses are folded neatly beside the sink. Her bangs are sticking up a little bit. Koushi’s arm twinges with the want to reach up and brush them down. Her face looks more pronounced like this, her eyes more inescapable. She lets go of her hair.

“I know this is an inconvenience,” she says. Her eyebrows are furrowed so tightly that just looking at them gives Koushi a sympathy headache. “I apologize.”

“It’s not an inconvenience,” Koushi says. By now he has known Shimizu long enough to have prepared for this. “It’s nice to have company.”

Shimizu considers him, beginning to methodically run her fingers through tangles. “Your parents?”

“Business trip.” Koushi tries for a breezy laugh, but it comes out hollow. Shimizu’s eyes land on him cautiously and he backpedals. “Just until Friday, though.”

“I see.”

“They’re really busy,” Koushi says, not fully knowing why.

Shimizu nods once, with the slow hesitation of someone who doesn’t understand, but there’s a comprehension in her gaze that pulls at Koushi’s stomach. “I see.”

Koushi leads her into the living room and insists that she make herself comfortable under the kotatsu despite her repeated comments about not wanting to impose. They drink their tea in the restless quiet of the dim room and the distant rain. Shimizu still has the towel around her neck, hair pulled over to one side, with the sleeves of Koushi’s sweatshirt rolled evenly past her wrists.

Koushi trawls for something to say. He’s known Shimizu for a little over a year now, sure, but accessing the depths of her still feels an impossible task. He’s still processing the sight of her in these walls, at _his house_ , in the same room as his embarrassing first-grade karate photos and his grandma’s butsudan and the TV on which he used to faithfully watch _One Piece_. It’s almost too miraculous to accept.

“So…” Koushi clears his throat and gestures vaguely to the sliding glass door on the other side of the room, outside of which the rain continues to torrent. It had come on suddenly, after brewing in the sky overnight, ever-deepening purple-gray clouds at last giving out.

Shimizu is the last person he’d ever expect to be caught in a storm without an umbrella, and yet there she’d been, hurrying past the camellia bush in front of his house with two bags of groceries, her head bowed against the downpour.

“I loaned my umbrella to Azumane-san,” she tells him. Koushi had seen her through the kitchen window when he’d just happened to glance up from washing dishes. He’d left the water running.

“Oh,” says Koushi.

“He was stranded at the convenience store,” she elaborates. “And I live closer.”

“How gallant,” Koushi says, instead of just thinking it like a normal person. The smallest dent appears between Shimizu’s eyebrows and he starts flailing his hands. “I-I’m not making fun of you, I promise!”

She moves to take a drink of tea, but the steam fogs up her glasses, so she lowers the cup again. _Cute_ , Koushi manages to only think this time, even if it is a very loud, panicked thought.

Shimizu adjusts her position, legs shifting under the kotatsu, and gazes in thoughtful silence at the corner of the table. Both of her hands are wrapped around her mug, fingers fitting gently against the ridges. The rain flooding down the sliding door sends distorted shadows fluttering across her face.

She opens her mouth to speak, but all that comes out is a breath, at first. Even that feels restrained, afraid to be obtrusive. Koushi wants to tell her that she can breathe as loud as she likes—but that would be weird.

“I don’t mean to put you out, Sugawara-san,” she murmurs.

“You’re not putting me out,” Koushi says immediately, shaking his head hard for emphasis. “Like I said, it’s no problem. I’m glad I could help.”

“That’s very kind,” she says, frown deepening still, “but I—”

“You’re my friend,” Koushi says.

It wouldn’t be so bad, he thinks, to fling open the sliding door and let the monsoon take him, wash him away to some other country, or to be raised by dolphins. Shimizu’s lips don’t so much as twitch, but Koushi catches that notion of a smile in her eyes again, fleeting and bright like a star falling.

“...nice,” she whispers.

Koushi leans closer, angling his ear toward her. “Huh?”

“Your towels smell nice,” Shimizu says.

Koushi blinks at his great-grandma’s painting of cranes framed over the TV, then slowly turns his head back to her. The angle of her mug conceals her mouth as she drinks from it, and Koushi can hear his heart beating, an escalating rhythm filling his ears. Shimizu’s cheeks are a lively, vivid red.

“Oh,” Koushi says. He doubts his cheeks look much better. “Thank you.”

Koushi remembers so much of this afternoon, later—details and impressions more vivid than the narrative built on them. He remembers the leek sticking out of Shimizu’s grocery bag, the pair of bright blue running sneakers drying in the foyer, the drum of the rain against the roof. He remembers the way the tea had smelled, and how carefully Shimizu had drunk it; he remembers the cadence of certain words in her steady, murmuring voice— _practice_ , _fortitude_ , _future_. He remembers her bumblebee socks.

It’s the sound of the rain that does it, in the end. Something about it has always made him sleepy in a way he cannot stop or notice. He wakes up curled up on the floor under the kotatsu in a room that’s now completely dark, warm and disoriented and faintly hungry, drooling onto his sleeve.

Shimizu’s wrist is tucked against her cheek, her palm covering the arm outstretched over the table. Without the lights on, Koushi can’t make out her face. In her sleep, she hums, shifts a little, fingers curling around the empty air, and underneath the kotatsu, Koushi’s ankle is touching her knee.

 

 

* * *

 

 

There is still some winter left over in the March wind that stings Koushi’s face on the empty road. Spring afternoons are never really afternoons at all, to him—only longer, brighter mornings—and this one is no different, even though it feels like it ought to be.

“Congratulations, Shimizu,” he says, and feels immediately stupid afterwards.

She’d cut her hair shoulder-length the weekend after Nationals, but it still whips across her forehead when another gust comes through and agitates the mountain pines. She’s holding her diploma tube with both hands. When she turns away from the view of the valley, she blinks at him a moment and then gently smiles, and Koushi’s mind latches onto the same word as always.

“Congratulations, Sugawara,” she answers. It sounds a lot more purposeful than his had, as though she is congratulating him for a litany of things, achievements and victories he hadn’t perceived.

On Koushi’s left, Daichi snorts. His broad palm lands between Koushi’s shoulder blades with enough force to abort any reply.

“You’re both so stiff,” he says, and when Koushi turns his head to glare at him, he’s grinning. Koushi can never stay annoyed when Daichi grins like that. “It’s graduation, not a business meeting.”

Asahi’s handkerchief looks like it can’t take many more tears, but he hasn’t given up on it yet. “Sh-Shimizu, what you said—your speech—”

“Ah,” Shimizu says. A flush tinges her ears. “Did I sound all right?”

“Yes,” Daichi says before Koushi can answer with something ridiculous like _you were my favorite part_. “You were great, Shimizu. You’re always great.”

And then his chin wrinkles up, and he starts to cry.

“Sawamura,” Shimizu says, eyes widening.

Daichi sniffles, wiping his nose with the sleeve of his uniform—something twists in Koushi’s chest when he realizes that keeping it clean won’t matter anymore, that Daichi will probably donate it to the school, because he’s always thinking of things like that.

“Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, sorry… I just—I said I wouldn’t—”

“Daichi!” Asahi wails, and sweeps all three of them into a hug.

Koushi finds his face squished against Asahi’s chest. One button digs uncomfortably into his cheek. He doesn’t care. Daichi’s elbow is jammed between his ribs; Shimizu’s back is pinning his arm to his side. The wind picks up, stronger.

Asahi is brave enough to say it first. “I’m going to miss you.”

“Asa- _hi_ ,” Koushi scolds him, even though his voice is a little more ragged than he plans, “I told you to quit talking like we’re all going to die.”

“People don’t have to die for you to miss them,” Asahi says with a great sniffle. “Sorry—I should have asked before I hugged you—is it okay?”

It’s so okay that Koushi feels like he could stay on this hill for the rest of his days, held on all sides by the three most important people in the world. It’s more okay than he’s confident or clever enough to say out loud, even now.

“It’s fine,” Shimizu tells Asahi—tells all of them, just as she always has, with patience and conviction as sure as a river’s course, in a way that they have never been able to replicate. She wriggles free so that she can sling her left arm across Koushi’s back, her fingers fisting into the side of Daichi’s jacket.

Another gust of wind races past them, and Shimizu draws them all a little closer, her warmth flush against Koushi’s side, her hair tickling his cheek.

Her voice wobbles when she whispers into Asahi’s shirt, “Thank you all for believing in me.”

Everything is different now, and yet it isn’t: one way or another, Koushi is always the last of them to cry.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Koushi had changed out of his sweaty uniform an hour ago, passing it along gratefully to Takeda-sensei in a plastic bag to join everyone else’s, and now he’s in the burgundy tracksuit he hasn’t taken out of his locker in months. It smells like shoes.

Shimizu finds him in the gym.

“It’s late,” she announces herself from the doorway. Her hair is pulled over her shoulder in one of her big scrunchies, the blue one.

Koushi catches the ball in both palms when it bounces back to him off of the wall. Shimizu always walks so quietly that he never hears her approach, so he’s just gotten startled out of his mind, but he’s not about to show it.

He cranes his neck. “Ah, is it?”

“You know that it is,” she says, tugging the backs of her slippers over her heels before stepping inside.

Koushi always forgets how huge the gym feels when they’re not all in it, how much more deeply things echo. From this distance, it looks as though crossing the yawning golden space between them might take Shimizu hours, but she reaches him soon enough. She watches his face for a moment, then blinks down at the ball in his hands. Koushi rolls it between his palms reflexively.

“You need to sleep,” she tells him. “We have a calculus test tomorrow.”

Koushi grimaces. “Yuck. I forgot.”

Shimizu sighs softly through her nose and reaches out, both of her hands cupping the ball on the sides he isn’t touching. She steps a little closer.

“Go home, Sugawara,” she says, but she doesn’t try to take the ball from him, only holds it, vertical to his horizontal.  

Her eyes still look like a storm on the edge of ending, and will every time. She had cried so freely when they’d all lined up, tears dribbling onto her jersey, looking at them from the bench with wonderment and pride and something else.

Koushi’s arms are still burning. He’s still in love with the way she says his name.

Somewhere between his mind and his mouth, _I’m really fine_ turns into, “I don’t think I’m going to keep playing.”

Koushi’s hold on the ball slackens, but he doesn’t let go. The words sound different than he had imagined them, made all the more complicated by utterance—and Shimizu isn’t saying anything.

“I just…” he says, and waits for something of substance to come. “Yeah.”

“I see,” Shimizu says.

“Y-You’re—” There’s no going back, now, even though the question is childish. “You’re not going to ask me why?”

Shimizu blinks. “No. Why would I do that?”

“Because I…” Koushi finds himself floundering, lost at sea. “After everything…”

Shimizu’s unperturbed face gazes back at him, and he can’t look anymore. He bites his lip, bowing his head over the ball between them. The tips of his fingers whiten when they press down on the leather.

“It isn’t my position,” she says with painstaking care, “to question what you want.”

 _Can’t it be?_ Koushi thinks, inexplicably. _Just this once?_

“You’re right.” He doesn’t know where the laugh comes from, but it comes, brittle and half-made. “I guess it doesn’t matter.”

Shimizu shakes her head. “I didn’t say that.”

“I should—”

“Sugawara—”

“I should be happy, right?” he whispers, and lets go of the ball. Shimizu holds it in place for only a moment, and then draws it close to her chest. Koushi grips his sweatpants, bites his lip. “I mean— _Nationals_. All that work we did… all those times Daichi said Karasuno would go there again. And we… we—”

“Won,” Shimizu supplies, as though she can tell he still thinks it’s a myth, a dream. She had hugged him last—first Daichi, then Asahi. She had held on, arms linked behind his neck, for what had felt like a long time.

“But I…” He laughs again, this even more manufactured than the last. “I just came in here, and—started feeling bad for myself.”

He still can’t look her in the eye, even now. So pathetic. He’s never told anyone about this, about the feeling bad. There has never been any good that it can do. But Shimizu is—

“You aren’t bound by volleyball, Sugawara,” she says. “If it makes you unhappy, then you should stop. It’s your decision.”

Koushi doesn’t know what it is about her answer that buries itself to the hilt between his ribs. All he knows is that this is wrong, all wrong, nothing like he’d imagined or wanted it—somehow, they’ve ended up with five feet of space between them and their heads bowed to the floor, lying to each other.

“You’re right,” he says, and pulls together a smile, the one that requires no thought or feeling. “Sorry for bugging you with it, Shimizu. Thanks for coming to check on me.”

“You weren’t—” she starts to say, sharply, but when he lifts his head she’s ducked her eyes again. “It’s not a problem.”

On the walk to the club room, Koushi drops his head back until it can bend no further. The stars are out, little pinholes in the universe, without a single cloud to veil them. It smells like the advent of spring.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Even after growing up among the mountains and the clouds, Koushi still finds miracles in the sight and smell of snow. It accumulates differently on Tokyo’s edges than it ever had on the outline of his hometown, turned quickly to slush by endless milling footsteps. At Christmastime, the streets are filled with twinkling lights and distant pop music, and Koushi always gives himself a second or two to admire them on his dash to the train.

He runs into Shimizu completely by chance, crossing an overpass on his way back from his Veterinary Medicine final. Her hair is cut short, and she’s wearing blue. She’s facing away from him, watching the cars go by underneath, but he recognizes the way that she holds herself without having to see her face. He stops in his tracks.

“Ah,” he says.

She turns. Her eyes go a little rounder when they land on him—brighter. Or maybe it’s a trick of the lights, still twinkling.

“Sugawara,” she says, stalls for a moment as though unsure of what to do, and then bows her head quickly. Her hair—one side of it held with criss-crossing white bobby pins—springs a bit when she straightens back up, and Koushi isn’t even sure how he’s still upright.

“You live here?” he blurts out. “In Tokyo?”

He still hasn’t moved from the middle of the walkway. Shimizu approaches him without hurrying—his eyes dart to her purse. It’s shaped like an orange slice.

She catches him staring at it and lifts it by the strap for a moment, giving it a faint, affectionate smile. “From Hitoka-chan.”

Koushi nods, now staring at her instead. “It’s cute.”

“Thank you.”

“So you—”

“No,” she says. “Hitoka invited me for the weekend. I finished my exams last week—”

“At Tohoku?”

“That’s right.” The smile hasn’t left her yet. Koushi can’t help thinking it’s unusual compared to what he once knew—how at ease Shimizu is with her own happiness now—but maybe that’s just the first of many things he’s missed out on watching her embrace. The street lights really make her eyes look like they’re glittering when she angles her face up at him, one gloved hand adjusting her navy knitted scarf. “And you’re at—Tokyo Gakugei, right?”

She knows! “Right,” Koushi all but squawks. “I’m actually, um, on the…”

The sight of her face, clearer now by proximity, distracts him. The mole at her lip, the color at the tip of her nose, the way her new glasses (thin gold frames) magnify her eyes just the slightest bit. Small talk seems so stupid all of a sudden, and he’s made the mistake of holding the truth back from her before.

“Sh-Shimizu, I…”

“Yes?”

“I did keep playing,” he says, softly, gratefully, “after all.”

“Ah,” she says. “I’m glad.”

“Y-You are?”

“Mm,” she says, and bows her head. Her bangs flutter in a passing gust of wind that makes Koushi shiver; she pushes some of them out of the way with her fingers when she murmurs, “I should have argued with you, back then.”

Koushi’s throat fills up and closes. A couple strolls by, and he steps aside belatedly, though it puts him closer to her than he’d planned—an inch or so between them, and nothing more. The warmth of Shimizu’s body renders the cold nothing more than an invention.

When Koushi looks at her face again, she’s blushing. Blushing as she had unfurling a banner, blushing as she had with her arms around his neck in the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium, blushing as she had when she had whispered in the living room he misses, as though it was a secret, that his towels smelled nice. A vibrant pinkness down to her neck.

She gazes watchfully up at him, and Koushi remembers her hands closed around his cold, trembling fingers, how her steady gaze had reoriented him.

 _Please wait a little while to marry me_.

Before he knows it, something inside of him has frothed over, a wave crashing at last against a cliff, and then:

“I think the world of you, Shimizu.”

Oh, jeez. He’s gone and said it, hasn’t he? He’s finally gone and said it.

There it is, Koushi thinks, wondering if it has changed the shape of the night, as a part of him had always imagined it would. There it is.

“I always have,” he says.

She doesn’t say anything for a long time. She holds Koushi’s gaze as one might hold water in their hands. The snow cascades in perfect silence around them, accumulating in her hair, his scarf.

A tension in her shoulders wanes before he can perceive that it had been there to begin with. She reaches across the negligible distance between them, and gently, gently slots her fingers between his.

“Suga,” she says, gazing at the easy tangle of their hands. “Would you like to walk for a while?”

A little of the snow settles at the slope of her shoulder, the crown of her head. Koushi can still hear music.

“Yeah,” he says, thinking, perhaps not for the first time, and with the same plain clarity as he’d thought on a summer afternoon of a river, that he would follow her anywhere. Anywhere.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Hold still,” Shimizu says, balancing Koushi’s hand in her palm. She wraps the tape around his finger with a brisk and practiced method, and Koushi’s mind is somewhere outside of his body, flailing amongst the stars. He and Shimizu are kneeling across from each other on the clubroom floor. Her hair is in a braid, and her hands smell like air salonpas.

“You’ll need to put ice on it when you get home,” she tells him. “This might hurt a bit.”  

“Ow!” Koushi yelps when she tightens the tape. His middle finger pulses with a bone-deep discomfort.

“Sorry about that,” Shimizu says as he winces, with the same tranquil flow as everything else. She closes the tape and lets go, dropping her hands onto her thighs, and then moves to stand.

Koushi flexes his fingers experimentally, and when he encounters no pain, he gets to his feet, too, sneakers squeaking on the tatami. Shimizu is at the shelves, putting back the first aid kit.

“You should have said something during practice,” she says with her back to him.

“W-Well, I didn’t want to worry anyone,” Koushi says with a wave of his hand, trying to alleviate the tension with a laugh. “And it wasn’t really a big deal or anything, so—”

“Sugawara-san.” Shimizu’s voice halts him. The first aid kit is back on the shelf, but she still hasn’t turned around. Her fingers are curled at her sides, the beginnings of fists.

“Sugawara-san,” she says again, and bows her head to her chest. “Worry us.”

Koushi’s first year had rushed by him, nothing more than a series of hopes and colors and losses—red welts on his arms, late nights dreaming of glory at Daichi’s house, laughing at his classmates’ jokes, walking to the front door past the camellia bush. The nape of Shimizu’s neck, and the golden gym floorboards, and the turning of the seasons. He’s a second-year already, and yet—he feels like he hadn’t learned anything at all until Shimizu had spoken that to him, with a trembling, lucid candor.

Her arms have grown since they were first measured for their uniforms. The cuffs of her sleeves rest a little too high above her wrists. And Koushi notices, only then, that her hair is more out of the braid than in it, subtly disheveled.

They walk to the school gates together, footfalls matching pace, unspeaking. The sky above is clear, littered with stars, and in the valley the lights of the houses are on. The last breath of spring is in the wind: cold, but promising.

“Someday,” Koushi says, already aware that it sounds corny, but unable to hold it in, “we’ll win. Before our last year is up. I know we will.”

Shimizu is quiet beside him, one hand on the strap of her messenger bag. She hadn’t changed out of her jersey.

Koushi nudges his shoulder into hers as lightly as he can. “I’m sorry that I worried you.”

Shimizu breathes out, all the way, and then cranes her neck to look at the stars above them. Koushi does it, too. Far off, he can smell the mountain.

“I know we will, too,” she says, as if swearing it on a constellation. “It’s like Ukai-sensei said. Because we don’t have wings.”

On the hill overlooking their mountain town, with Shimizu breathing softly beside him and the stars holding court overhead, Koushi falls in love with those words in Shimizu’s voice third. Quietly, unobtrusively, with a startled breath of laughter.

 _This_ , Koushi thinks, remembering the way that she had written _setter_. _This moment. This sky. This one._

**Author's Note:**

> It is perhaps worth mentioning that a line that drifted by my single brain cell but that I couldn't find good context for was Shimizu asking _Why do you love it?_ about volleyball and Suga thoughtfully answering, _I don't know, I just do, I guess_ , and then, while looking at her, completely serious, _We just love the things we love._
> 
> Please read [the sky within](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17128475)!


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